A client came to us needing a one pager for a conference, to work as a handout at the stand and as a poster on the wall. Before writing the brief, they had spent time with an AI image generator, producing a version of the document they already had in their head. The images came through attached to the task.
Then came the instruction that made the job easier.
Please could you make the design not a copy paste of the below, but for it to look editorial and in line with our brand guide.
Not a copy paste. That is the whole job in four words, and it is a clearer brief than most written ones.
What the AI version actually got right
Quite a lot, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than reaching for the defensive line about machines not replacing designers.
It settled the running order. Headline top left, logo top right, a bar of top-line facts, a horizontal flow diagram through the middle, an impact section below that, partner artwork at the foot. Deciding what comes first and what follows is usually the slowest part of any design job, because it is not really a design question. It is an argument that has to be resolved before anyone opens a layout file.
The client’s own note on one of the images was exactly right: it was a very AI generated version, but it explained the flow very clearly. That is an honest read of what the tool is good at.
The real gap in most briefs is not effort. It is the distance between what somebody can picture and what they can describe. A client who cannot draw can now show you. That removes a round of guessing, and often a round of revisions with it.
What it could not do
Sit inside a brand that already exists
An AI mock-up produces a plausible, generic, financial services look. It does not know the client’s typefaces, how their colour roles are assigned, how much clear space the logo needs, or which of their greys is allowed to carry body copy. That information lives in a brand guide, and applying it is not decoration. It is what makes a document recognisable as theirs before anyone reads a word of it.
Hold hierarchy
The page had to carry five equal blocks of headline facts, a five step capital flow, a highlighted callout, an impact section with its own icon set, and a row of official third-party artwork. The AI version contained all of those elements. It weighted none of them. Everything spoke at the same volume, which on a poster means nothing gets read at all.
Handle artwork it does not own
Part of the layout required an official icon set supplied by a third party, with published rules about colour, spacing and alteration. Those rules are not negotiable and they are not guessable.
Survive contact with a printer
Bleed, embedded fonts, colour profile, resolution, a PDF that behaves the same on the organiser’s press as it does on screen. None of that is visible in a mock-up. All of it decides whether the job works on the day.
Two formats is not one layout scaled up
The conference asked for a single-sided A4 case study handout at 210 x 297 mm, and a separate A2 poster at 420 x 594 mm with a minimum resolution of 300 to 600 dpi.
Those are two different documents that happen to say the same thing.
The handout is read at arm’s length by somebody who has chosen to pick it up. It can hold a paragraph. The poster is read across a room by somebody walking past who has not chosen anything yet. It has perhaps two seconds to establish what the thing is and what it does, which means the headline and the flow diagram have to carry the whole argument at three metres.
Scale one into the other and you get a handout with absurd type, or a poster nobody can read from standing distance. The text stays the same. The hierarchy, the entry point and the spacing all change.
There was also a choice worth naming. The organisers offered a fill-in template with your logo dropped into it, or a custom design carrying comparable information. The template is free and safe. It also guarantees that your page looks like every other page in the room. In a gallery of case studies built on the same grid, the one that is not is the one that gets looked at.
The part that made it possible in a day
The brief landed with the document needing internal approval and a final file with the organisers by the end of the following day. The client asked whether a first draft could be ready by the next morning. It was.
That is not because we work faster than anyone else. It is because nothing had to be established first. The brand guide was already in hand. The tone was already agreed from previous work. The approval path, the file naming, the delivery format and the person who signs off were all known. Work started on the design itself in the first hour instead of the second week.
An ongoing design relationship is not a discount on hours. It is the removal of the start-up cost from every job that follows.
Bring us the AI version
We would rather see it than not see it. It tells us what you are picturing, what order you think the story runs in, and which parts you consider important. It is a better brief than a brief, and a worse deliverable than a deliverable.
Then let us throw it away and build the real thing.
